this is a stinky newsletter
beyond the "lunchbox moment"
tl;dr
Tagline: a newsletter on diasporic longings and other acquired tastes, or, the newsletter form of the term “Ugly Delicious”
Subject matter: Culture, Food & Beverage, diaspora cuisine, mental health, annoyingly-political food content
Form: short-form food memoir/prose, free-form social-cultural commentary, gastro-poetry, insider’s looks into personal projects (ie. incomplete recipes, chili oil diaries, etc.), and eventually, collaborations with other food writers/creators
Publication Cycle: Whenever I feel like it (for now)
Why you should subscribe: You enjoy Introverted Asian Cuisine
Adam is a timid, lonely child of immigrants in suburban America who gets bullied for bringing kimchi and chopsticks to school. He begs his mother to give him lunch money and foregoes her home-cooked meals in order to escape the ridicule and humiliation from his peers. It’s not until later in his life that he re-discovers his love for his culture’s food and learns to cook it to celebrate his cuisine (and absolve himself of his guilt).
We’re all familiar with this story arc. It’s been told and re-told countless times. Once an emotional rallying cry and cue for trauma-bonding amongst Asian-Americans, the “lunchbox moment” is now a quickly-aging trope, one I might argue is becoming dangerously over-recycled. Let’s be real, do we really need another lunchbox story? I sometimes wonder, if a white, corporate media outlet were to co-opt and spin their own rendition of the lunchbox moment, would I even be able to tell?
I’ve been writing for a good while now but food writing is still something I’m relatively new at. Naturally, I’m speculating what it means for me – a 2nd gen Taiwanese-American working in F&B – to enter this space as a storyteller. The lunchbox moment may seem like an obvious starting point but the truth is, my high school lunches were not like that. It wasn’t some white kid shaming my mom’s bento boxes that pushed me into racial self-loathing; it was my Asian friends who did that. In fact, there’s quite a few things about me that defy the blueprint of my racial identity. To track my personal history and relationship to my own culture (and cuisine) would be baffling to most (or perhaps comforting?), as it follows no distinct, linear trajectory nor predictable plot line.
I’ve never had a lunchbox experience but I’ll have to admit that there’s been a part of me that wanted to believe I did. It may seem twisted to wish additional trauma upon oneself but after reading others’ testimonies, I realized I wasn’t alone in that sentiment. Maybe there’s a comfort to belonging to a singular narrative, even if it flattens out all the nuance to our individualized, lived experiences, even as they cease to be authentic to us. Maybe it simply speaks to my yearning to be a part of the collective, even as I felt wounded by it.
The lunchbox moment has passed. And I suspect it’s only happened to a fraction of us because if we take a closer look, we will realize how much is missing in the story and how it doesn’t truly represent us – no singular narrative can. As thrilling as it is to shout “me too!” and feel some semblance of togetherness with the whole, I wonder how much our stories have been reduced and sanitized by the trope into something easily digestible by white publishing companies. For whom is the lunchbox story really written for? Besides, being bullied for your lunch is probably the most universal and approachable story for others to understand because who wants to get shamed for their food? White liberals can easily sympathize with our pain, then pat themselves on the back for “doing the work” and being “open-minded” with their palates (Asian food being trendy now), while dodging accountability for all the other ways minorities are made to feel unwelcome, unfairly treated, and unsafe, much beyond lunchtime.
“The white gaze expects brown suffering, and even if these stories of shame and bullying are true, they can also serve to enforce that suffering. Suddenly, belonging means catering to the stories white people assume we carry.” – Emily Chu, Eater
As much as I want to think I’m invulnerable to these pressures (what I think they think of me), I have to wonder how much I’ve unintentionally strained my voice to their liking. As a writer of color, I have an undying suspicion of myself and whether or not my experience is “authentic” – for I can only be seen as privileged and happily-assimilated or I can only have trauma that they can comprehend and fit into their worldview (otherwise it’s not real).
I may always struggle with sharing my story but I know now that only way I ought to is by laying it bare in all its tender ugliness. To speak with searing honesty and unflinching detail. This newsletter, I hope, can be a practice in authenticity. An exercise in vulnerability, delivering the most un-curated, un-defined, off-brand, but truest self I can manage. The self that includes all the muted and shifting feelings, the nausea of being Asian in America. Call it a desire to be… err, stinky again, to share the things that are difficult to swallow, the things that may give you an upset stomach (or upset feelings). Unpalatable notions that will thwart whatever perceptions you have of me, then thwart them again. To do so, I suspect, is to occupy a space unsanctioned by others, ultimately, creating one for myself.
If you’ve read and supported my writing thus far, thank you. I will be continuing my work here on this Substack for financial reasons, but also to escape the trap of website-building (and content-creating), which, ironically, can have its own way of stifling creativity. I realized there was a problem when I was spending way more time in Adobe than in my word processor so I’m hoping to silence the other distractions as I refocus on my original passion.
You can expect to hear more of my usual storytelling voice, albeit a tad more un-polished and casual – covering topics that range from the dark, violent history of the Chinese tea trade to why I can’t seem to season my wok correctly. I gravitate towards short-form food memoir but really anything goes here – socio-cultural commentary, essays, recipe testing, stupid restaurant concepts, you name it. The goal is to be thoughtful with my words, but not precious. I hope for my work to be candidly subversive to our notions of yuck and yum, but not without ample self-flagellation and self-interrogation. I want to question why we eat what we eat but in doing so, I will also question myself.
I have the hunger of a skinny boy with fast metabolism. I have a longing wedged in my gut, an indomitable curiosity to learn more. This newsletter is about that longing; it is my growth as a home cook, a student, an incomplete self in process. It’s about that 4-year old who’s endlessly inquisitive and can’t stop asking why. I firmly believe this longing is what makes us human because, after all, is not hunger just another form of longing? And most importantly, when I do this, I derive some indescribable joy that I want to share with others, and that should be enough reason for me to do it.
So welcome, this is my rotating platter of food memories, my lazy susan of stories. I hope you’ll stay awhile, just remember to take off your shoes.